While everyone seems to be raving about how AI is going to change the world over the next decade, I am becoming increasingly disillusioned with the technology. As a music promoter, I am keenly watching the AI-generated music story play out on Spotify, but my biggest concern right now is the application of AI in the world of Digital Marketing.
I’m not talking about AI-generated marketing ‘content’ that is already popping up in all its hallucinogenic glory from those who are less precious of their brand. What concerns me is that AI is becoming the gate-keeper for what people see, and it is getting it wrong in the most basic ways that suggest there is no intelligence or learning involved whatsoever.
Quite ironically, this article started out as a piece in my weekly newsletter under the heading “Is Social Media Still Working?”. In the last week, my Facebook page following passed 600 and this year I’ve accumulated over 200 more followers on Instagram. But the majority of those followers are artists and bands looking for opportunities to perform, rather than music fans looking for a great night out at a gig. Meanwhile, posts on both platforms are reaching a decreasing fraction of followers, let alone non-followers that are needed to grow my audience. (Conversely, on TikTok I only have 65 followers but posts regularly get in front of 10 times that number, occasionally reaching 1,500-1800, with very little effort).
I also gave an example of yet another artist, the singer Christine Tobin, who had their Meta accounts unexpectedly suspended earlier this month. This seems to be happening more frequently to artists and professionals, with total impunity from the digital moguls that have us all captivated! When marketing experts are selling new ways to ‘beat the algorithm’ every day on a platform that can ‘make you disappear’ at a whim, is it all really worth it?
I have no doubt that social media helped to get Music Spoken Here up and running from a ‘standing start’ nearly three years ago, and I’m also sure that a social media presence is necessary for any artist or promoter (perhaps a nod to this ‘necessity over enthusiasm’ – I’ve noticed a few artists abandoning their ‘personal’ profiles and maintaining just their professional pages and profiles), but how much effort should we be investing in platforms that have zero commitment to do anything for us (even when we pay them to) and are notoriously difficult to deal with when things go wrong? With hundreds of thousands of users leaving X last year, more are picking up with Threads and BlueSky, but do we just blindly submit to cyclic recreations of ourselves on the next big platform every few years?
Mailing lists are more direct, but…
Over the last six months, I’ve been regulating and reducing my promotional activities on social media, while building my mailing list, slowly but surely, as a more direct way to update people who have specifically ‘opted in’. Having spent most of Sunday afternoon composing and proof-reading the newsletter, I hit the ‘Send Test Email” button to be immediately confronted with the alarming message:
Your account has been temporarily suspended due to suspicious activity.
I emailed the service provider’s support team and I got a helpful and succinct response from Michael later that evening:
“The system caught some keywords and suspended your account automatically. The words were “Meta account” and “Suspended”. Is it possible to rephrase it to prevent the system from suspending it again?”
Anyone who runs a Meta Business Page or Profile will be aware of the volume of emails, Messenger messages and comments from the likes of “Meta Support Desk” threatening suspension of your account, due to anything from “unauthorised use of copyright material” to “suspicious activity”, if you don’t click a dodgy link within 24 hours. The first time it happens can be quite alarming – you’re just getting used to building an online presence, spent lots of time and effort on creating engaging content and people are following you, and you realise for maybe the first time that your account can be easily disabled and you are gone from your world of followers!
These “your Meta account will be suspended” emails are obviously a phishing scam to get your login details, and in a rather blunt attempt to protect themselves from being complicit in propagating them, my service provider apparently uses AI to scan messages before they are sent. If you dare mention “Meta account” and “suspended” in the same sentence, your card is marked! They have also chosen to take the rather drastic action of suspending the account entirely when ‘offences’ are discovered (I’ve suggested to them that a hold on the offending email would be more practical, ideally with some indication to their customer of where they transgressed!)
But even outside of the automated ignorance of this gate-keeping, AI, with all its ‘learning algorithms’, is making it increasingly difficult for me to do my job as a promoter and reach real people who have a genuine interest in what I’m doing. Here are a couple of specific examples.
Auto-correct and Predictive Text
Back in the 1990s, spell checker was a useful feature that started appearing in word processing software. Now, it seems auto-correct and predictive text invades pretty much every text-entry interface, but now I find I’m correcting MORE sneakily inserted “auto-incorrections” than I ever was correcting my own writing. The human brain is quite good at working out misspelled words in a given context, but automated text editing, which often goes unnoticed, can dramatically change the context of what is written. Even as I type this, predictive text is smugly suggesting the next word! It has even become a popular“finish this sentence” game that people play with their phones on social media now.
A key aspect of Artificial Intelligence is its ability to learn. I use the phrase ‘pay what you can’ a lot in my marketing material – it’s an important unique selling point – but despite 18 months of me ‘training’ (correcting) auto-correct (across exclusively Apple devices, which know more about me than I do, I might add), it continues to ignorantly convert the final can to can’t, because it neither recognises the final apostrophe as a single closing quote mark, or pays any attention to my previous reactions to its continual mistake.
Bots
Any promoter or event organiser will be aware of the ticket-scam bots that spring into action whenever you post a “sold out” gig announcement on Facebook – the post below demonstrates this primitive machine in action.
But while these automated interactions are annoying and potentially costly to anyone following up for unavailable tickets, it’s not as nefarious as the behaviour I’ve observed with Meta advertising. I used to do paid advertising on Meta for every event but stopped after the summer this year, primarily because I was getting too many ‘reactions’ from what seemed like fake profiles. As a single-venue promoter of live music, I need to reach a very specific audience, so I used the Meta advertising tools to define that. Meta adverts are charged according to duration and estimated reach, and they are of course keen to keep you updated on how well your advert is going with reach and interactions stats. I wasn’t comfortable spending my limited marketing funds for made up results that weren’t translating to increased attendance. (That said, I am currently running my first paid advert on Instagram since the summer, by way of a periodic testing of the waters).
So, what now?
I’ve been reading a few books this year covering various music scenes that emerged in the UK since the 1980s, up to the last decade when social media really became an unapologetic marketing revenue generator. There is nothing that people did then that wouldn’t work now, particularly if you want people to physically attend live gigs. I’m looking forward to going a bit ‘retro’ over the coming months, if for nothing more than the sheer fun of it all!
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